7 ms·

The origin of live and let live (and a very interesting system to analyse)

60 points by etherael 17y ago

numair 17y ago
This reads as though it is straight out of a Monty Python sketch: I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out "We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery."
- stcredzero 17y ago
  I went to a military academy as a high school student, and we had lots of military instructors who were in Vietnam. One of them was a Staff Sergeant in US Army logistics. Though they were logistics, they occasionally had to defend themselves. According to this one instructor's account, US logistics personnel would deliberately miss the enemy, and would instead try to almost hit them in order to scare them. The logic was this: as logistics, you don't want to fight them -- that's not your job! You just want to get out of there in one piece with your supplies. So you try to get the machine-gun bullets to go right past them or right around them. That should scare them into taking cover. The last thing you wanted to do was to kill someone's best friend and have them go super suicide commando on you. I told this to an acquaintance who was an ex-marine from a family full of ex-marines, and he just commented that this was what was wrong with the Army. Apparently, a lot of people in the Marines are definitely there to kill the enemy.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
the escalation of war throughout modern history, culminating in the world wars, is a fascinating subject. the methodology of total war is so alien to the human psyche that it requires quite a bit of brain washing and careful planning, and even then you constantly have to maintain it via a strict hierarchy, lest you get the sort of unspoken agreements between sides as discussed extensively in the article. the escalation to total war was caused by at least three things: 1. the growth of government as a percentage of GDP (more efficient taxation and indoctrination) allowed ever greater a nation's economic output to be turned to aggression. see Bertrand de Jouvenal's excellent On Power for a lengthy dissertation on this subject. 2. the slow change from a multi-polar to bi-polar power arrangement. in the animal kingdom you will see "posture fighting" between contesting males where little actual damage is done. This is because a real fight is disastrous, even for the male who wins since he may be weakened so much that he can not now defend himself against a third male who will swoop in on this opportunity. Likewise with a multi-polar power arrangement. No one nation will devote tons of resources to a total war with another because doing so will weaken both with regards to other nations. what we see in pack animals (including primates) is that aggression generally only occurs when one side has overwhelming advantage (5 vs 1) and thus can act without reprisal. larger fights, while rarer, usually end when one side gets a kill. why doesn't the winning side press the advantage? again, the risk is large for an uncertain payoff. 3. of course, technology. this one is harped on by so many history channel shows that I feel no need to go into it.
lionhearted 17y ago
This reminds me a little of how Shaka Zulu broke from rituals to conquer most of sub-Saharan Africa. Shaka was one of the most effective African generals and conquerers in recorded history, because he changed the nature of African warfare very quickly. Basically, pre-Shaka, warfare was a ritualized thing in the area. The tribes would take throwing spears and stand on two hilltops facing each other, and threw spears and shout at each other until one side gave up and fled. The conflicts would create injuries, but not so many fatalities. Shaka moved to a more shock troop charge style of attack. He outfitted his guys with large, wooden shields, and short, heavy spears that could slash or stab. So when the other side lined up to fight ritually, Shaka charged and would have his side massacre the other. Normally you'd see the other sides adapt, but he brutalized and then assimilated his enemies very quickly so they couldn't adjust to his tactics. He swept through Africa conquering very quickly. This has been seen many times throughout history - basically, the side of the war that fights with less rules, wins. But normally, if the other side realizes you're not fighting a gentlemanly ritual any more, they adapt. Yet a few military men in history moved so fast that their opponents couldn't adapt. Shaka, Alexander, and Genghis Khan are the first three examples that come to mind - they fought relatively dirty, breaking rituals and customs of warfare with new equipment, a more brutal focus, and immediately assimilating or executing prisoners of the defeated. Because they moved so fast, and all the survivors became either new recruits or were killed, there was no time for an organized, adapted resistance. That's how those guys were able to take such large amounts of land in short amounts of time. The ironic part is that the kind of personality that'll do that rarely knows restraint, so they overextend themselves and have their empires die after their usually premature death.
- swombat 17y ago
  How did Alexander fight dirty? In all the biographies I read, it seemed his "advance" was to use clever tactics, rather than to fight dirty. Would love an example of this.
  - lionhearted 17y ago
    He had no regard for his troops' lives - something like 80% of his soldiers that went with him died, and he conscripted new guys everywhere he went. So he'd conscript, shock attack losing a lot of guys, then conscript from the newly defeated, and repeat. He did make advances in strategy and technology too - I believe his major military innovation was actually much longer spears than opponents, and he moved fast enough that that technology wasn't diffused and adapted. He also executed, assassinated, or otherwise brutalized his own supporters fairly often when it would advance a goal of his. Alexander's romanticized in the west, but he didn't have much respect for the lives of his soldiers and people.
ugh 17y ago
Buy the author's book: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257123981&sr=8-3 http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-A... And please put a NSFW tag on links to a racist's website (no, this is not about the graphic, this is about the rest of the content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_%28activist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_%28activist%29).
- j1o1h1n 17y ago
  Is there a generally accepted "LOON" tag?, Mr Sheppard gives us: > What I have termed the "Dynamical Laws": > 1. The only power that females have is given to them by males; > 2. The only thing which females do with that power is use it against males. Complete with graphic of some Third-Eye-Vagina-Dentata.
  - ugh 17y ago
    Could be brilliant satire. Well, I doubt it :)
- etherael 17y ago
  I didn't actually know that the site in question was run by this fellow, but I fail to see how it matters in the context of the linked article? Especially in a "someone is looking over my shoulder and saw me reading about world war I military history" fashion being comparable to "saw me looking at sexual imagery". I don't believe it's appropriate at all.
  - ugh 17y ago
    I have nothing whatsoever against the content of the linked excerpt (in fact I quite distinctly remember reading it somewhere else and liking it a lot). And I also quite enjoyed the discussion here. I just don't think it is so great if you link to content hosted by nutjobs. The article is SFW, so using NSFW was maybe misleading.
    - 17y ago

60 points by etherael 17y ago

This reads as though it is straight out of a Monty Python sketch: I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out "We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery."

stcredzero 17y ago
I went to a military academy as a high school student, and we had lots of military instructors who were in Vietnam. One of them was a Staff Sergeant in US Army logistics. Though they were logistics, they occasionally had to defend themselves. According to this one instructor's account, US logistics personnel would deliberately miss the enemy, and would instead try to almost hit them in order to scare them. The logic was this: as logistics, you don't want to fight them -- that's not your job! You just want to get out of there in one piece with your supplies. So you try to get the machine-gun bullets to go right past them or right around them. That should scare them into taking cover. The last thing you wanted to do was to kill someone's best friend and have them go super suicide commando on you. I told this to an acquaintance who was an ex-marine from a family full of ex-marines, and he just commented that this was what was wrong with the Army. Apparently, a lot of people in the Marines are definitely there to kill the enemy.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

the escalation of war throughout modern history, culminating in the world wars, is a fascinating subject. the methodology of total war is so alien to the human psyche that it requires quite a bit of brain washing and careful planning, and even then you constantly have to maintain it via a strict hierarchy, lest you get the sort of unspoken agreements between sides as discussed extensively in the article. the escalation to total war was caused by at least three things: 1. the growth of government as a percentage of GDP (more efficient taxation and indoctrination) allowed ever greater a nation's economic output to be turned to aggression. see Bertrand de Jouvenal's excellent On Power for a lengthy dissertation on this subject. 2. the slow change from a multi-polar to bi-polar power arrangement. in the animal kingdom you will see "posture fighting" between contesting males where little actual damage is done. This is because a real fight is disastrous, even for the male who wins since he may be weakened so much that he can not now defend himself against a third male who will swoop in on this opportunity. Likewise with a multi-polar power arrangement. No one nation will devote tons of resources to a total war with another because doing so will weaken both with regards to other nations. what we see in pack animals (including primates) is that aggression generally only occurs when one side has overwhelming advantage (5 vs 1) and thus can act without reprisal. larger fights, while rarer, usually end when one side gets a kill. why doesn't the winning side press the advantage? again, the risk is large for an uncertain payoff. 3. of course, technology. this one is harped on by so many history channel shows that I feel no need to go into it.

lionhearted 17y ago

This reminds me a little of how Shaka Zulu broke from rituals to conquer most of sub-Saharan Africa. Shaka was one of the most effective African generals and conquerers in recorded history, because he changed the nature of African warfare very quickly. Basically, pre-Shaka, warfare was a ritualized thing in the area. The tribes would take throwing spears and stand on two hilltops facing each other, and threw spears and shout at each other until one side gave up and fled. The conflicts would create injuries, but not so many fatalities. Shaka moved to a more shock troop charge style of attack. He outfitted his guys with large, wooden shields, and short, heavy spears that could slash or stab. So when the other side lined up to fight ritually, Shaka charged and would have his side massacre the other. Normally you'd see the other sides adapt, but he brutalized and then assimilated his enemies very quickly so they couldn't adjust to his tactics. He swept through Africa conquering very quickly. This has been seen many times throughout history - basically, the side of the war that fights with less rules, wins. But normally, if the other side realizes you're not fighting a gentlemanly ritual any more, they adapt. Yet a few military men in history moved so fast that their opponents couldn't adapt. Shaka, Alexander, and Genghis Khan are the first three examples that come to mind - they fought relatively dirty, breaking rituals and customs of warfare with new equipment, a more brutal focus, and immediately assimilating or executing prisoners of the defeated. Because they moved so fast, and all the survivors became either new recruits or were killed, there was no time for an organized, adapted resistance. That's how those guys were able to take such large amounts of land in short amounts of time. The ironic part is that the kind of personality that'll do that rarely knows restraint, so they overextend themselves and have their empires die after their usually premature death.

swombat 17y ago
How did Alexander fight dirty? In all the biographies I read, it seemed his "advance" was to use clever tactics, rather than to fight dirty. Would love an example of this.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  He had no regard for his troops' lives - something like 80% of his soldiers that went with him died, and he conscripted new guys everywhere he went. So he'd conscript, shock attack losing a lot of guys, then conscript from the newly defeated, and repeat. He did make advances in strategy and technology too - I believe his major military innovation was actually much longer spears than opponents, and he moved fast enough that that technology wasn't diffused and adapted. He also executed, assassinated, or otherwise brutalized his own supporters fairly often when it would advance a goal of his. Alexander's romanticized in the west, but he didn't have much respect for the lives of his soldiers and people.

ugh 17y ago

Buy the author's book: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257123981&sr=8-3 http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-A... And please put a NSFW tag on links to a racist's website (no, this is not about the graphic, this is about the rest of the content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_%28activist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_%28activist%29).

j1o1h1n 17y ago
Is there a generally accepted "LOON" tag?, Mr Sheppard gives us: > What I have termed the "Dynamical Laws": > 1. The only power that females have is given to them by males; > 2. The only thing which females do with that power is use it against males. Complete with graphic of some Third-Eye-Vagina-Dentata.
- ugh 17y ago
  Could be brilliant satire. Well, I doubt it :)
etherael 17y ago
I didn't actually know that the site in question was run by this fellow, but I fail to see how it matters in the context of the linked article? Especially in a "someone is looking over my shoulder and saw me reading about world war I military history" fashion being comparable to "saw me looking at sexual imagery". I don't believe it's appropriate at all.
- ugh 17y ago
  I have nothing whatsoever against the content of the linked excerpt (in fact I quite distinctly remember reading it somewhere else and liking it a lot). And I also quite enjoyed the discussion here. I just don't think it is so great if you link to content hosted by nutjobs. The article is SFW, so using NSFW was maybe misleading.
  - 17y ago